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25040Venturebeat.comPinterest debuts Explore, a feature that surfaces trending pins and native videoshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/11/15/pinterest-debuts-explore-a-feature-that-surfaces-trending-pins-and-native-videos/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/15/pinterest-debuts-explore-a-feature-that-surfaces-trending-pins-and-native-videos/#respondTue, 15 Nov 2016 18:00:01 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2107969Pinterest is rolling out a new feature called Explore that uses machine learning to surface trending ideas on the visual idea search and bookmarking service from select tastemakers and publishers. It will display not only popular pins, but also native videos, which the company has been actively pushing in the past year. Explore is rolling out […]
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Pinterest is rolling out a new feature called Explore that uses machine learning to surface trending ideas on the visual idea search and bookmarking service from select tastemakers and publishers. It will display not only popular pins, but also native videos, which the company has been actively pushing in the past year.

Explore is rolling out starting this week and will be available on Pinterest’s website, as well as on its iOS and Android apps. It complements the current Home feed, where 150 million monthly active users currently discover pins shared by the people, boards, and interests they follow. The new feature is intended to introduce “new ideas, videos, and tastemakers” that perhaps a user normally wouldn’t have found.

Technically, Explore already existed, having launched internationally in April, but it only featured categories. This time around it’s more dynamic, trending, and personalized to each user.

Pinterest divides its Explore section into three parts. Today’s picks is a personalized recommendation list that are based on daily search trends; so Tuesday might display food and drink pins, while Fridays would have weekend projects and Sundays would be all about shopping. The second area is Topics, which uses machine learning to pop up ideas, searches, and pinners from across more than 30 topics, based on your current interests.

Lastly, native videos are incorporated in Explore, providing a daily video collection designed to provide quick tips for learning new things, such as styling a tie for the holidays. It’s worth noting that while the content in this space will be populated by tastemakers, the videos will also include advertisements that will play automatically, featuring marketing messages from American Express, Macy’s, Sony Pictures, and others.

The inclusion of native video is a culmination of testing Pinterest has done over the past several months. In August, it announced it was working on a native video player that would enable users, brands, and advertisers to upload video right to its site without having the content streamed from YouTube or another third-party provider. Pinterest claimed that its improvement in video discovery would start to roll out “in the next few months,” so the use of machine learning and Pinterest Explore is a logical place for its inclusion.

Publishers that Pinterest has enlisted help from for its Explore feature include GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Food Network, National Geographic, Brit + Co, Refinery29, Tastemade, and HGTV.

One way of thinking about Pinterest Explore is that it’s like Facebook and Twitter’s trending topics offering. More than 75 billion pins have been saved on the site, giving Pinterest plenty of data from which to discern recommendations using machine learning. It’s this technology which has spurred the company’s user growth. As my colleague Jordan Novet wrote recently:

Pinterest often already knows a lot about something that you’ve just pinned, partly because it knows that some other people have pinned it right alongside one or more other pins. That’s called ‘co-occurrence,’ and it’s a powerful signal that pins are related. But sometimes — say, in another country where many people speak a less-popular language — a user pins something that Pinterest has never seen even once before, and Pinterest can’t do much with the text associated with the pin. That’s where deep learning can make a big contribution. Similarities in the content of the pin can give Pinterest a clue as to what it might be.

So it’s unlikely that the company will encounter similar issues that Facebook ran into when it first leveraged human editors for its trending topics before switching to machines. But is that really an apples-to-apples comparison? People come to both sites for different compelling reasons: Pinterest for creative ideas and Facebook for communication and social engagement.

The addition of Explore fuels other opportunities for Pinterest to monetize itself, providing advertisers with a space where promoted pins and other sponsored content could appear … if the price is right.

Since it’s a learning product, the very first time you visit the new section, it’ll start out by displaying ideas based on your Pinterest usage. These are merely suggestions, and the company gives you the liberty to customize which topics you’ll see. From then on, Pinterest will tailor itself to be more personalized to things it thinks might interest you the most.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/15/pinterest-debuts-explore-a-feature-that-surfaces-trending-pins-and-native-videos/feed/02107969Pinterest debuts Explore, a feature that surfaces trending pins and native videosPinterest for Android and iOS now lets you tell other users if you’ve tried pinshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/11/10/pinterest-for-android-and-ios-now-lets-you-tell-other-users-if-youve-tried-pins/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/10/pinterest-for-android-and-ios-now-lets-you-tell-other-users-if-youve-tried-pins/#respondThu, 10 Nov 2016 18:00:48 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2104278Pinterest, the startup behind the eponymous app that lets users pin photos and other content to boards, is announcing today the launch of a new feature in pins that lets users specify whether they’ve tried what’s shown in a pin — for example, a pair of running shoes, or a recipe — and optionally tell […]
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Pinterest, the startup behind the eponymous app that lets users pin photos and other content to boards, is announcing today the launch of a new feature in pins that lets users specify whether they’ve tried what’s shown in a pin — for example, a pair of running shoes, or a recipe — and optionally tell other users if they loved it or if it’s not for them. They can also post tips that other users can see later.

The feature is rolling out now on Android and iOS, and it will be coming to the web in the next few weeks, Pinterest engineering manager Nadine Harik wrote in a blog post.

“When you find a Pin you want to try, you can view a new feed to see who’s already cooked that recipe, bought that product or made that project and how it went for them. You can also see the percentage of Pinners who recommend the Pin,” Harik wrote.

Also, when you go to your profile on Pinterest for Android and iOS, you’ll be able to see all of the pins that you’ve tried so far.

This is a nifty, unconventional sort of addition that goes beyond the typical social network habits of liking, commenting, and sharing — sort of like how Pinterest has pushed into ecommerce through buyable pins.

The new feature could well make Pinterest feel a little less like a place where you find things you aspire to buy and a little more like a community where people help one another.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/10/pinterest-for-android-and-ios-now-lets-you-tell-other-users-if-youve-tried-pins/feed/02104278Pinterest for Android and iOS now lets you tell other users if you’ve tried pinsHow Pinterest reached 150 million monthly users (hint: it involves machine learning)http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/08/pinterest-150-million-users-machine-learning/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/08/pinterest-150-million-users-machine-learning/#respondTue, 08 Nov 2016 23:18:41 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2102796On Pinterest.com, I find myself being summoned from various directions, as if I’ve just stepped into a party with my closest friends. Many pins I see are interesting to me — it’s a pleasant feeling. There’s a mid century modern light brown leather couch. A house with a window lined with dark brown wooden shutters. […]
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On Pinterest.com, I find myself being summoned from various directions, as if I’ve just stepped into a party with my closest friends. Many pins I see are interesting to me — it’s a pleasant feeling.

There’s a mid century modern light brown leather couch. A house with a window lined with dark brown wooden shutters. A shelf made from the back of an iMac. A media console on wheels with iron legs and wooden slats. Cinnamon rolls.

Behind each of these recommendations, there’s a reason. Each one is related to something I’ve previously pinned to my Pinterest boards, or something I’ve viewed before, or something I’ve searched for. And, in the case of the cinnamon rolls — it’s because someone I follow pinned it.

None of this is a coincidence. Pinterest’s engineers have been refining the app’s recommendation systems for years. People in the U.S., like me, are used to this sort of personalization. But now Pinterest has more than 150 million monthly active users, and most of the people joining are outside the U.S. So to continue the growth — usage is up about 50 percent year over year, as last year there were 100 million monthly active users — Pinterest has taken new approaches, including employing artificial intelligence, a faster system for ranking, and localization of content.

Of course, other up-and-coming companies, like Airbnb and Spotify, are also personalizing and localizing their content to accumulate more users and keep them around. Pinterest stands out thanks to its large, image-heavy data collection that users themselves organize. In the past two years, Pinterest has taken steps to do smarter things with all the images, and it looks like that’s paying off.

“With a lot of the focus that we’ve had going international, you can imagine why visual signals would be really valuable there,” Mohammad Shahangian, Pinterest’s lead data science engineer, told VentureBeat in an interview at Pinterest’s San Francisco headquarters.

Deep learning

Machine learning is at work across all four key parts of Pinterest: home feed, search, related pins, and visual search. Today happens to be the one-year anniversary of the launch of the fourth of those.

The visual search system depends on a hot type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data — such as, you guessed it, photos in pins! — and then getting the neural networks to make inferences about new data. Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other companies are using this approach more and more, now that more data and economical computing power is available than ever before.

Above: Visually similar search results.

Image Credit: Screenshot

The way Pinterest uses this technology in visual search is certainly compelling. You just click or tap the magnifying glass in the top corner of a pin, and it will let you adjust the size and location of a rectangle superimposed over the image. The software then finds pins that are visually similar to whatever is in the rectangle. Additionally, in some cases you can tap any of the dots that appear on top of objects in a pin to bring up other pins that contain similar objects.

But Pinterest has also begun using deep learning to optimize other parts of its app — like determining related pins.

Pinterest often already knows a lot about something that you’ve just pinned, partly because it knows that some other people have pinned it right alongside one or more other pins. That’s called “co-occurrence,” and it’s a powerful signal that pins are related. But sometimes — say, in another country where many people speak a less-popular language — a user pins something that Pinterest has never seen even once before, and Pinterest can’t do much with the text associated with the pin. That’s where deep learning can make a big contribution. Similarities in the content of the pin can give Pinterest a clue as to what it might be.

And from there, Pinterest is “off to the races in terms of what we can do for your recommendation,” Shahangian said.

But. But! Deep learning is not the primary driver of recommendation systems at Pinterest, even though you might think that image data must be king.

“At the end of the day, you’d always prefer [to ask] ‘What have users curated?’ ‘What have the users done?’ [and use that] as the ultimate signal… as these two things are the most relevant,” said Dmitry Kislyuk, Pinterest’s lead visual search engineer. “That said, there is tremendous opportunity for content, especially content that we know less about.”

Ranking

In May 2015, Pinterest introduced a ranking system to change the order of pins based on how much Pinterest predicted people would engage with pins.

That was big — it led to 30 percent more repins, said Stephanie Rogers, a related pins engineer at the company.

But in January of this year, Pinterest went even further. The company stopped using a batch-processed machine learning system to re-rank content based on what users do, a ranking process that could be done, say, overnight. Instead the company started doing real-time re-ranking, which takes just seconds — fast enough that Pinterest can refine the order of related pins as the person selects a pin to look at more closely.

And Pinterest now takes into consideration your recent activity, like your latest search and the newest pins you’ve saved, when it shows related pins.

Above: Related pins that have been ranked based on my predicted engagement with theme.

Image Credit: Screenshot

“An example of that might be you were looking up a celebrity, and then you see a celebrity with a certain outfit on, and you click on that pin,” Rogers said. “Related pins should be about that celebrity and not about the outfit [they] were wearing.”

Just adding recent activity into the mix increased the number of pins people save by 4 percent, Rogers said.

Localization

Pinterest has used several tactics to gain traction in foreign countries in the past year.

“Everything is long tail in these emerging countries,” Shahangian said. So deep learning certainly has a role to play. Fast ranking also matters, because the first few things people see can have a big impact on future engagement. There’s more to it, though.

Employees have figured out that some kinds of content — like photography and hair and beauty — do well in many countries, while others don’t. Wedding-related pins from the U.S., for instance, don’t usually play well in other countries.

Pinterest has built machine learning models that focus on just one single part of a category in one country. As certain categories catch on, Pinterest identifies early adopters. Pinterest also looks out for “tastemakers” in certain countries who “time after time bring pins that go on to be successful,” Shahangian said.

And providing content in people’s native language is crucial.

Above: Pinterest as it appears in Germany when a user has selected German as their language.

Image Credit: Screenshot

“Through a variety of techniques, we basically increased local impression share from 8 percent to 54 percent,” Rogers said. In other words, more than half of the content people see is in the language they’ve selected.

It seems that users appreciate that, because in some cases this has led to increased engagement, a spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

What comes next

As you might expect, Pinterest has a few ideas about what to do next.

For one thing, Pinterest can start re-ranking visual search results, just like it does for related pins.

It could also start applying deep learning to natural language processing for making certain kinds of recommendations. Pinterest’s ads team has already experimented with that, Kislyuk said.

And it could do more to promote visual search to its users. For example, Pinterest could start talking up its ability to recognize an object given just an image.

That’s possible now, but it’s not obvious — even though it’s impressive and already helping people.

A few weeks ago, Rogers saw a mosque on TV and took a photo of it. She added it to Pinterest. After running a visual search, she was able to find a pin of the same building, and the pin’s description indicated that it was the Vakil Mosque, which is located in Iran. “OK, now I know where this is,” she recalled thinking at the time. “This is awesome.”

Pintastic stats

200 million visual searches per month

150 million monthly active users, up 50 percent year over year

75 billion pins

20 million pin recommendation candidates ranked per second

10 billion pins being recommended every day, double the number from last year

30,000 queries per second for related pins feed

250 percent increase in number of localized pins (based on country and language) in the home feed

75 percent of sign ups are outside the U.S.

40 percent of people signing up are men, and the number is up 70 percent year over year

30 percent of engagement comes from related pins

20 percent increase in new users outside the U.S. because of changing “Pin it” to “Save”

12 percent increase in engagement because of recent home feed algorithm updates

10 percent increase in weekly active users due to launch of personalized topics for each user

10-15 percent increase in activations after the user experience was redesigned around country-specific topics

4 percent increase in number of pins saved and 5 percent increase in localized related pins due to initial attempt to rank related pins based on most recent pins users have saved or searched

6 times more likely that someone will save a pin since the launch of object detection in pins; hundreds of millions of objects have now been detected

5 times more personalized pins for users outside the U.S.

3 times more likely than last year for users outside the U.S. to see localized content in search and related pins

3 times faster than the app used to be following overhaul

2 times as many users than last year who are running visual searches

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/08/pinterest-150-million-users-machine-learning/feed/02102796How Pinterest reached 150 million monthly users (hint: it involves machine learning)Pinterest makes Instapaper’s premium features free for allhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/11/01/pinterest-makes-instapapers-premium-features-free-for-all/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/01/pinterest-makes-instapapers-premium-features-free-for-all/#respondTue, 01 Nov 2016 16:00:31 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2096295Nearly three months after being acquired by Pinterest, Instapaper is making some changes that will impact its users. Starting today, the online bookmarking service has discontinued its premium offering and opened up the paid features to everyone. Users will now have access to features such as full-text search for all articles, unlimited notes and speed […]
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Nearly three months after being acquired by Pinterest, Instapaper is making some changes that will impact its users. Starting today, the online bookmarking service has discontinued its premium offering and opened up the paid features to everyone.

Users will now have access to features such as full-text search for all articles, unlimited notes and speed reading, text-to-speech playlists, an ad-free Instapaper website, Kindle Digests of up to 50 articles, and the ability to send articles to Kindle through a bookmarklet or mobile app. These were previously only available if you paid $3 per month or $30 per year.

Pinterest purchased the service created by Tumblr cofounder Marco Arment in August with the promise that it would remain operational as an independent app. The premium service was started in 2014 as a means to support the development of Instapaper, but now that it’s no longer a startup, there’s no need for a paid model to exist.

Instapaper competed against the likes of Pocket, Flipboard, Evernote (at one point), and Readability. With a “Read Later” bookmarklet, users could select any webpage and have it saved to Instapaper to read later across any device. The service is available on iOS, Android, and Kindle devices.

It’s likely that making the premium features available free for everyone could spark an uptick in usage, giving the Pinterest-owned company additional data for any experiments or product they’re developing.

Those who currently have paid subscriptions will receive a prorated refund in the coming weeks.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/01/pinterest-makes-instapapers-premium-features-free-for-all/feed/02096295Pinterest makes Instapaper’s premium features free for allPinterest launches the Pin Collective so brands can hire influencers to create adshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/19/pinterest-launches-the-pin-collective-so-brands-can-hire-influencers-to-create-ads/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/19/pinterest-launches-the-pin-collective-so-brands-can-hire-influencers-to-create-ads/#respondWed, 19 Oct 2016 14:50:15 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2084686Pinterest is moving deeper into the influencer marketplace with a new program that matches brands and advertisers with content creators to create “inspiring, actionable pins.” With this feature — called the Pin Collective — the company behind the popular visual search and idea engine has hand-selected a group of publishers, production shops, and creators to craft pins […]
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Pinterest is moving deeper into the influencer marketplace with a new program that matches brands and advertisers with content creators to create “inspiring, actionable pins.” With this feature — called the Pin Collective — the company behind the popular visual search and idea engine has hand-selected a group of publishers, production shops, and creators to craft pins that capture users’ attention.

“We know marketers have a lot to manage,” wrote Pinterest creative strategist Nikki Bazzani in a blog post. “To make sure it’s always easy to advertise on Pinterest, we’re developing a creative ecosystem that helps marketers of all sizes create inspiring, actionable Pins — no matter their budget or production resources. Our goal is to help brands get what they need to produce content that’s optimized for Pinterest’s visual format and Pinners’ unique behavior.”

Pairing brands with influential content creators isn’t a new thing, as it’s something YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are doing or have done in the past. Through Pin Collective, brands will be able to create more viral pins — from default pins to place pins, buyable pins, or even promoted pins with video — which, in turn, leads to more engagement and more money for Pinterest.

Brands will pay creators directly for their work, as Pinterest is merely the matchmaker, and all negotiations and details will be managed by the brands and creators.

This is the company’s latest effort to move into professional content, expanding from Pinterest’s previous initiative — the Pin Factory — which is its in-house production studio to help advertisers craft promoted pins.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/19/pinterest-launches-the-pin-collective-so-brands-can-hire-influencers-to-create-ads/feed/02084686Pinterest launches the Pin Collective so brands can hire influencers to create adsPinterest’s Easter egg lets developers test their hacking skillshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/pinterests-easter-egg-lets-developers-test-their-hacking-skills/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/pinterests-easter-egg-lets-developers-test-their-hacking-skills/#respondFri, 14 Oct 2016 17:27:11 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2080771Pinterest has revealed a little Easter egg its engineering team has incorporated into the visual search and bookmarking service. For many people, it’s a place to find and share creative ideas, but what about users with technical skills? Well, Pinterest hasn’t forgotten about you: If you do a search for “reactjs,” “nodejs,” “javascript,” or any other […]
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Pinterest has revealed a little Easter egg its engineering team has incorporated into the visual search and bookmarking service. For many people, it’s a place to find and share creative ideas, but what about users with technical skills? Well, Pinterest hasn’t forgotten about you: If you do a search for “reactjs,” “nodejs,” “javascript,” or any other keyword pertaining to the company’s web stack, you’ll be able to hack the site.

OK, it’s not really hacking in the truest sense of the word, but you’ll be able to access a game designed to test your developer chops. After you run the search, Pinterest will display a bash terminal which engineers will find familiar, and which you will used to prevent a fictional hacker group from taking down Pinterest. You’ll be presented with clues to solve the problem, and you’ll have to retrieve the “secret bash commands” to discover what the hackers want.

Above: Screenshot of the Hack Pinterest game.

Image Credit: Screenshot

Those who succeed will receive a secret key that enters them in a chance to win a $50 gift card that can be used to purchase any of the 10 million unique products available on Pinterest through buyable pins.

This Easter egg is an interesting and entertaining way to widen the site’s demographic appeal, but it would be remiss to think that this isn’t a recruiting opportunity, something that other companies such as Uber have leveraged. Pinterest is constantly hiring new engineers, so being able to easily assess someone’s credentials while making it engaging is prudent planning. The company can also see if potential recruits have what it takes to beef up the service’s security and protect data for the 150 million monthly active users.

It appears that the “Hack Pinterest” feature is only available on Pinterest’s website and not through the company’s mobile apps.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/pinterests-easter-egg-lets-developers-test-their-hacking-skills/feed/02080771Pinterest’s Easter egg lets developers test their hacking skillsPinterest passes 150 million monthly active users, up from 100 million a year agohttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/13/pinterest-passes-150-million-monthly-active-users-up-from-100-million-a-year-ago/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/13/pinterest-passes-150-million-monthly-active-users-up-from-100-million-a-year-ago/#respondThu, 13 Oct 2016 15:57:33 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2079812Pinterest revealed today that more than 150 million people use its visual bookmarking and ideas service, with more than 75 billion “ideas” shared. This is a 50 percent increase from more than a year ago, when the company first revealed its usage numbers and declared it had 100 million monthly active users. More than half […]
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Pinterest revealed today that more than 150 million people use its visual bookmarking and ideas service, with more than 75 billion “ideas” shared. This is a 50 percent increase from more than a year ago, when the company first revealed its usage numbers and declared it had 100 million monthly active users.

More than half of the people using Pinterest and 75 percent of new sign-ups are from outside of the U.S., according to company chief executive Ben Silbermann. And the service is no longer mainly attractive to women, as men make up 40 percent of the users, an increase of 70 percent from last year.

For some, 150 million MAU may not seem like a lot, especially when compared to Facebook and Twitter. But Silbermann views it differently: “Pinterest is more of a personal tool, not a social one. People don’t really come here to see what their friends are doing…Instead, they come to Pinterest to find ideas to try, figure out which ones they love, and learn a little bit about themselves in the process.”

Another statistic the company shared is that Pinterest now serves 10 billion recommendations daily, the equivalent of 3 trillion a year. More than 150 million visual searches are performed monthly, and there are more than 1 million businesses on the service (compared to the 60 million on Facebook) with “tens of thousands” actively advertising.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/13/pinterest-passes-150-million-monthly-active-users-up-from-100-million-a-year-ago/feed/02079812Pinterest passes 150 million monthly active users, up from 100 million a year agoPinterest hires Google’s former head of image search to lead engineeringhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/09/06/pinterest-hires-googles-former-head-of-image-search-to-lead-engineering/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/06/pinterest-hires-googles-former-head-of-image-search-to-lead-engineering/#respondTue, 06 Sep 2016 20:32:15 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2047489Pinterest announced that it has hired Li Fan as its new head of engineering, where it’s likely that she’ll utilize her experience in image search, infrastructure, and data analysis to improve ranking and discoverability of pins across the service. Prior to joining the company, Fan was the head of image search at Google and the vice […]
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Pinterest announced that it has hired Li Fan as its new head of engineering, where it’s likely that she’ll utilize her experience in image search, infrastructure, and data analysis to improve ranking and discoverability of pins across the service. Prior to joining the company, Fan was the head of image search at Google and the vice president of search at China’s largest search engine Baidu.

In a statement, Pinterest chief executive Ben Silbermann remarked, “We’re building the technology to help millions of people discover everyday ideas. Li’s expertise in large-scale image search technology and engineering leadership will be key as we continue developing a comprehensive recommendations engine for people around the world.”

A graduate of Fudan University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in computer science, Fan has spent her career in the search space, not only managing the ads spam infrastructure team at Google, but also other areas such as Page Rank, crawl diagnostics, regional indexing for non-U.S. users, and systems for regions outside of the U.S. While at Baidu, she was responsible for the company’s system and platform group, which ensured scalability, and founded its cross-function data processing and analysis group.

With her hiring, Pinterest has made additional investments in the search and engineering field. She’ll be working on current projects such as object detection, visual search, and camera search, which was unveiled this summer, while also developing the service’s video product, buyable pins, and multi-item cart checkout feature.

Her experience could be useful as Pinterest continues to improve how it makes its 75 billion pins easy to find and shareable. While having similarities to a search engine, the big difference is that Pinterest is heavily image based, so ordinary protocols and processes for services like Google, Bing, or Yahoo won’t be easily transferrable to Pinterest. The company needs to bring in strong technology to help it decipher the images constantly uploaded to the service daily.

Fan joins other new hires, including Snapchat’s former head of measurement and insights Gunnard Johnson and former Xbox design lead August de los Reyes.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/06/pinterest-hires-googles-former-head-of-image-search-to-lead-engineering/feed/02047489Pinterest hires Google’s former head of image search to lead engineeringA lesson from Instapaper: The freemium model is doomedhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/09/01/a-lesson-from-instapaper-the-freemium-model-is-doomed/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/01/a-lesson-from-instapaper-the-freemium-model-is-doomed/#respondThu, 01 Sep 2016 22:10:12 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2041956GUEST: News of Pinterest’s acquisition of Instapaper received a bittersweet reaction from users of the latter. Many fear an imminent change in the level of the team’s dedication and a drop in customer service, leading to eventual shut down. Pinterest and other giants have a history of “killing” apps they acquire. This was, for instance, the fate […]
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GUEST:

News of Pinterest’s acquisition of Instapaper received a bittersweet reaction from users of the latter. Many fear an imminent change in the level of the team’s dedication and a drop in customer service, leading to eventual shut down.

Pinterest and other giants have a history of “killing” apps they acquire. This was, for instance, the fate of a former competitor of Instapaper — Iceber.gs — a visual bookmarking startup that shut down right after Pinterest bought it.

The Pinterest - Instapaper deal does not come as a surprise, not only because the two are both in the field of organizing content, but also because of Instapaper’s freemium business model. Given the generosity of the free product offering, users had little incentive to pay for it. An acquisition seemed a highly likely option to capitalize on the investments and the time spent building and maintaining Instapaper.

Instapaper’s fate would have been different had the product been a strictly paid one. As would have many of the other services that shut down because they were free but did not get acquired. Springpad — another player in the bookmarking field — is one example. It closed its doors in 2014, despite reportedly having a multi-million user base.

Having a free product allows you to grow very fast and to show a compelling story to potential investors. But with the speed and the investors, you lose control — over the product you are building, over who you are building it for, and over its ultimate fate.

Charging for a service might slow down growth, but it keeps founders grounded and in touch with the product and its users. It enables them to focus and make educated decisions that, in the end, could determine whether the service survives or not.

And there are more reasons paid models have a better chance at survival:

Introducing a paid plan is the perfect reality check . Only if people really need your product will they pay you for it. And if they don’t, it’s best to find this out sooner rather than later and adjust.

As you charge money for your core product, you focus all your sales and development efforts on it rather than on the endless search for money elsewhere — investments, advertisements, or potential buyers.

Your deadlines, deliverables, and ambitions are determined by you together with your users rather than by investors, who have an agenda and goals of their own, often misaligned with yours.

Negative experiences associated with the decline of some of the great free services could very soon change the perception of the paid business model. Many users are already realizing that by paying, they in fact “buy” the focus of the founders, a cleaner (ad-free) product, and a contribution to its long term evolution.

If we see a major shift from free towards paid B2C products, it should bring a lot of health to the industry and, in the end , satisfaction and value for both startup founders and their users.

Nina Zavrieva is CEO of Channelkit. She previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group, Rocket Internet, and did a lot of freelance consulting work.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/01/a-lesson-from-instapaper-the-freemium-model-is-doomed/feed/02041956A lesson from Instapaper: The freemium model is doomedMath Camp shuttering Shorts and Roll apps on August 30, following Pinterest acquisitionhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/08/28/math-camp-shuttering-shorts-and-roll-apps-on-august-30-following-pinterest-acquisition/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/28/math-camp-shuttering-shorts-and-roll-apps-on-august-30-following-pinterest-acquisition/#respondSun, 28 Aug 2016 21:57:33 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2040114More than a month after it was acquired by Pinterest, Math Camp announced in emails to users that it is shutting down its photo sharing apps Shorts and Roll at 12:01 a.m. on August 30. The company advises you to download all your photos before then, as they’ll be removed permanently. You may not have heard […]
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More than a month after it was acquired by Pinterest, Math Camp announced in emails to users that it is shutting down its photo sharing apps Shorts and Roll at 12:01 a.m. on August 30. The company advises you to download all your photos before then, as they’ll be removed permanently.

You may not have heard of Math Camp, but it’s likely that you’ve heard of the apps that it produced, such as Shorts, Roll, and even Highlight, which was talked about at its debut during the South by Southwest interactive conference years ago. The team behind these services were acquired by Pinterest in July, but not the technology. It was said that the apps would be “sunsetted in the coming weeks,” and now we have a definitive date.

At the time, Math Camp promised that it would open-source many of its libraries and frameworks for developers to work on, but the consumer-facing apps will soon be no more.

The fate of Highlight is currently unknown, but it’s likely that it, too, will be discontinued on August 30, as the Math Camp team shifts to focus on Pinterest’s mobile discovery products.

Here’s an email users are receiving — the text is basically the same for both the Shorts and Roll announcement:

Last month we announced that we were being acquired by Pinterest and that Shorts would be shutting down.

We wanted to let you know that Shorts will officially be going offline this Tuesday, August 30th at 12:01am. Please make sure you share your final photos before then and download any from friends that you’d like to keep.

We can’t tell you how much we appreciate your using the app, and we hope to build lots of great new things for you down the road.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/28/math-camp-shuttering-shorts-and-roll-apps-on-august-30-following-pinterest-acquisition/feed/02040114Math Camp shuttering Shorts and Roll apps on August 30, following Pinterest acquisitionPinterest acquires Instapaper to improve article discoveryhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/08/23/pinterest-acquires-instapaper-to-improve-article-discovery/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/23/pinterest-acquires-instapaper-to-improve-article-discovery/#respondTue, 23 Aug 2016 17:00:19 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2036220Pinterest is making investments to help users discover and save articles on its visual search engine. The company announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Instapaper, the online bookmarking service that was created by Tumblr cofounder Marco Arment. In contrast to previous deals, this time Pinterest has picked up both the technology and a majority […]
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Pinterest is making investments to help users discover and save articles on its visual search engine. The company announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Instapaper, the online bookmarking service that was created by Tumblr cofounder Marco Arment. In contrast to previous deals, this time Pinterest has picked up both the technology and a majority of the team in its move to boost content sharing on the service.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Pinterest said that Instapaper will continue to operate as a separate app, adding that “a majority” of Instapaper’s three-person team will be joining Pinterest. One casualty of this acquisition: Instapaper’s developer product, Instaparser, which will be shut down on November 1, 2016.

Founded by Arment in 2008, Instapaper served as an app that let users shelve articles to read at their leisure. It competed against the likes of Pocket, Flipboard, Evernote (at one point), and Readability. With a “Read Later” bookmarklet, users could select any webpage and have it saved to Instapaper to read later across any device. The service is available on iOS, Android, and Kindle devices.

Five years later, however, Arment sold a majority share in Instapaper to Betaworks, claiming that the service had become too big for him to manage alone. The deal was structured to keep Instapaper around for as long as possible, and Arment even remained on as an adviser. During this time, the company explained that it had rewritten its backend, overhauled its mobile and web clients, improved search, and launched highlights, text-to-speech, and speed reading features for the product.

Fast forward to today, and the service is owned by Pinterest. “Instapaper provides a compelling source for news-based content, and we’re excited to take those learnings to Pinterest’s discovery products,” Instapaper said in a blog post. “We’ll also be experimenting with using our parsing technology for certain Rich Pin types.” Users should not experience any disruptions with Instapaper as a result of the deal.

The benefit for Pinterest is that it is acquiring a team that specializes in saving content from the web to an app, something that millions of people do on Pinterest daily. Pinterest does have a save button that encourages users to push content to the service, but it’s likely Instapaper will assist in the distribution of articles and information from publishers. It will likely also improve indexing and recommendations, especially as Pinterest invests in how pins and videos are distributed.

Instapaper’s team will move from their offices in New York City to San Francisco. As mentioned earlier, Instaparser is being shut down. The company is no longer accepting signups for new users and has halted billing for existing customers. The service will be terminated in November.

Brian Donohue, Instapaper’s chief executive, said in a statement: “The missions of Instapaper and Pinterest are aligned in helping people easily save content, and we’re excited to join forces. The Pinterest team is working on unique technical challenges, and their collective skill will add tremendous value to Instapaper. Additionally, I’m personally looking forward to working on new projects and integrations within Pinterest.”

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/23/pinterest-acquires-instapaper-to-improve-article-discovery/feed/02036220Pinterest acquires Instapaper to improve article discoveryPinterest now lets you opt out of ‘Picked for you’ pinshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/08/18/pinterest-now-lets-you-opt-out-of-picked-for-you-pins/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/18/pinterest-now-lets-you-opt-out-of-picked-for-you-pins/#respondThu, 18 Aug 2016 19:11:25 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2033205Pinterest, whose app lets people pin pictures and other content to boards, today announced a few product updates. The biggest one is a way to roll back one of Pinterest’s recommendation tools — the “Picked for you” feature. It’s Pinterest’s way of injecting pins into the home feed you see when you visit the app […]
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Pinterest, whose app lets people pin pictures and other content to boards, today announced a few product updates. The biggest one is a way to roll back one of Pinterest’s recommendation tools — the “Picked for you” feature.

It’s Pinterest’s way of injecting pins into the home feed you see when you visit the app on the web or in Pinterest’s mobile apps. Since they were incorporated into Pinterest in October 2013, some users have expressed negative feedback about it, and some have even launched browser extensions to block these pins altogether.

Now, you can go into the app’s settings and simply turn off the “Picked for you” option, the Pinterest community team wrote in a blog post.

“If you spend time curating your home feed — following and unfollowing boards so you see exactly the Pins you want — sometimes you just don’t want to see anything else in your feed,” the team wrote.

Pinterest also offers up Related Pins when you start looking at a single pin, it suggests boards when you save pins, and it lets you find visually similar pins using a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning. And if you’re in the mood to shop, Pinterest now offers a place to find Buyable pins. Clearly the company is not going to stop recommending, suggesting, and curating. But “Picked for you” may have been just too much, particularly alongside promoted pins that companies can pay to show Pinterest users.

Also today Pinterest said it now lets users send pins, boards, and user profiles in more apps, including Line, Messenger, Twitter, WeChat, and WhatsApp. And now users can send messages and board invitations to other users even if they’re not following one another.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/18/pinterest-now-lets-you-opt-out-of-picked-for-you-pins/feed/02033205Pinterest now lets you opt out of ‘Picked for you’ pinsPinterest launches promoted video ads in the U.S. and U.K.http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/17/pinterest-launches-promoted-video-ads-in-the-u-s-and-u-k/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/17/pinterest-launches-promoted-video-ads-in-the-u-s-and-u-k/#respondWed, 17 Aug 2016 11:00:41 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2031840Pinterest has begun showing promoted video ads across its visual search engine, allowing brands to leverage existing creative work done for offline media, such as television. The new ad format is similar to the Cinema Loop ads that companies like Flipboard are using — ads in which you’re shown a teaser in GIF format but […]
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Pinterest has begun showing promoted video ads across its visual search engine, allowing brands to leverage existing creative work done for offline media, such as television. The new ad format is similar to the Cinema Loop ads that companies like Flipboard are using — ads in which you’re shown a teaser in GIF format but view the full commercial after tapping to learn more.

Businesses with managed Pinterest accounts in the U.S. and U.K. are eligible for video ads, and the company has launched this format with five partners: BareMinerals, Behr Paint, Kate Spade New York, Lionsgate, and Purina.

“Pinterest’s mission is to build the world’s catalog of ideas, and one way to bring it to life is video,” shared Mike Bidgoli, a product manager for monetization who came by way of his startup’s acquisition in June. “Video is the number one ask from our partners and advertisers and…if you think about the trend of cord cutting, a lot of media budget is allocated to television, a market that’s shrinking. There’s a massive search for the next place for advertisers to deploy resources.”

With brands looking for the next logical place to advertise, Pinterest wants to become the lead contender for advertising budgets. The service isn’t putting any restrictions on videos — they can be square, vertical/portrait, or landscape format and can span any vertical, such as beauty, food, financial services, and entertainment.

Pinterest is using Cinema Loops, which will autoplay in your feed, but only to provide you with key frames of the full video. If you’re interested, tap to see the ad with sound enabled. Not only that, the site also allows advertisers to show related pins.

Videos can be any length, but Bidgoli revealed that in early tests, there was a higher propensity for people on Pinterest to watch longer videos. “People are on Pinterest to learn, discover, and do things, so there’s an opportunity for longer-form videos,” he said. This makes sense, as many people turn to Pinterest for guidance on how to cook, what to wear, how to change the oil on their car, topics that clips lasting mere seconds may not be able to cover.

Like Facebook, Snapchat, Google, and Twitter, Pinterest has become heavily invested in videos. It has seen the volume of video data saved increase 60 percent annually, and partners and advertisers have been asking for tools to leverage the format. There’s certainly incentive to appeal to brands, as 75 percent of the content on Pinterest comes from businesses.

In early tests, the company claimed that General Mills’ Old El Paso brand found that the promoted video ads were four times more memorable than non-video ads. “Our customers come to Pinterest with high intent, and the ability to show a recipe and our products through video is a unique opportunity to drive higher performance,” said Meredith Schaffner, General Mills’ marketing manager.

The launch of promoted video ads comes a couple of weeks after Pinterest announced plans to speed up video discovery for users. The upcoming changes include the launch of a native video player, something Bidgoli said will play an important role — it will no longer open up a player in another platform just to play the video. This technology has been carried over to the promoted side of the service.

Users will start to see promoted video ads when using Pinterest’s iOS and Android apps — 80 percent of all Pinterest users are on mobile — but the feature has not been made available for the desktop yet. Advertisers will need to have a managed account in order to purchase these ads.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/17/pinterest-launches-promoted-video-ads-in-the-u-s-and-u-k/feed/02031840Pinterest launches promoted video ads in the U.S. and U.K.How Pinterest harnesses the power of A.I. to transform the Buy It Now experiencehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/08/11/how-pinterest-harnesses-the-power-of-ai-to-transform-the-buy-it-now-experience/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/11/how-pinterest-harnesses-the-power-of-ai-to-transform-the-buy-it-now-experience/#respondThu, 11 Aug 2016 11:10:39 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2025864SPONSORED: This sponsored post is part of our Mobile Commerce Explosion series. Produced in partnership with Braintree, the series looks at the explosive growth in mobile and how it’s disrupting industries and impacting brands. See the whole series here. The refrain of “mobile first” seems anachronistic now, but 2016 may actually be the year mobile commerce has taken hold […]
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SPONSORED:

This sponsored post is part of our Mobile Commerce Explosion series. Produced in partnership with Braintree, the series looks at the explosive growth in mobile and how it’s disrupting industries and impacting brands. See the whole series here.

The refrain of “mobile first” seems anachronistic now, but 2016 may actually be the year mobile commerce has taken hold aided by AI and machine learning. Braintree’s GM of Mobile, Aunkur Arya, sat down with Michael Yamartino, Pinterest’s Head of Commerce, to break it down on stage at MobileBeat 2016.

Pinterest has long marketed itself as the world’s catalog of ideas—a place for users to find and save digital inspiration for real-life questions and ambitions. But with innovations in machine learning and AI the company has leveled up by adding visual search.

Leveraging AI and machine learning technology has allowed them to implement sophisticated image recognition into the platform, broadening a user’s opportunity to discover more projects and ideas across the site by using the camera on their mobile phone. If a user spots something out there in the world they’d love to have, there’s a good chance Pinterest will be able to match it to a pin—and a retailer who has it.

“There’s a shift in behavior from traditional, intent-based model of searching for something on the web to interact with a merchant directly,” says Arya.

Pinterest embodies the shift to discovery- and experience-based commerce but closing the new buying loop had been the final challenge. “It’s really evolved into the taste graph,” Arya notes. “Pinterest started as a place where users were putting their preferences for things they like and their inspiration. It became a collection of that data, but evolved into a place where people are buying things now.”

The seamless buying experience

“Because of that we launched buyable pins,” agrees Yamartino. “It was a way to take all of that user interest on Pinterest and turn it into purchasing power by connecting users with merchants.”

With the help of Braintree, Pinterest was able to create that seamless experience, which allowed consumers to go from pinning and searching to discovering and shopping.

And that’s Pinterest’s strength, Yamartino says. When the buttons became the new merchandising trend a year ago, too much of the focus was on the button itself. “There was a Buy Button craze, and I think that missed the mark,” he says. “The focus was on the button when really it’s about the whole shopping experience—how you help someone discover something.”

Personalization matters. A lot.

That’s where their other big use for AI comes in: personalization. As a user moves through Pinterest, they reveal a tremendous amount of information about themselves. Searches, pins, board names, and more get fed into algorithms that update the user’s home feed to deliver a more and more personalized experience.

“We’re constantly refining that model and building up a sense of what you’re interested in not just overall, but in the moment,” explains Yamartino.

Getting it right requires machine learning. It takes a lot of computing power and a great algorithm—but those are just table stakes.
“The two things you need to make a really good experience are a lot of data and a feedback loop that tells you whether your algorithm is progressing and going in the right direction,” Yamartino says.
And with over 75 billion pins on Pinterest, collected onto 2 billion boards and 100 million users interacting with them, the company has an incredibly powerful dataset and feedback loop.
Referring back to visual search, Yamartino explains, “Over 100 million times every month someone uses this visual search technology and that helps us refine it every time, so the accuracy just gets better and better.”

“Then they close the loop and convert to purchase,” adds Arya.

Stakes are even higher with mobile

In a mobile-first world, personalization becomes even more important as retailers deal with consumers using small screens in short chunks of time. “The better you are at limiting the set of things people need to consider to only the ones that are actually interesting to them,” Yamartino says, “the more successful you’re going to be.”
He notes that on mobile, you can only see roughly four items at a time—so retailers better make sure those are the right four items for that individual.
“The same is true if you’re showing the search results inside a retailer app or you’re building a marketplace,” Arya adds. “The stakes are just higher. A Best Buy, a Walmart—they’ve got to figure out how to merchandise on mobile and how to make it simple. They’re ultimately going to be competing with this kind of experience.”
And while large retailers have tapped into Pinterest, the platform is leveling the playing field, enabling many smaller companies with unique products to reach an audience directly. “For a lot of small companies, this is really the first time that they’ve done a lot of exploration into omnichannel,” says Yamartino. “And they’ve seen some tremendous growth right away.”

Sponsored posts are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/11/how-pinterest-harnesses-the-power-of-ai-to-transform-the-buy-it-now-experience/feed/02025864How Pinterest harnesses the power of A.I. to transform the Buy It Now experiencePinterest testing ways to improve video discoveryhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/08/04/pinterest-testing-ways-to-improve-video-discovery/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/04/pinterest-testing-ways-to-improve-video-discovery/#respondThu, 04 Aug 2016 17:00:21 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2021785Pinterest is interested in not only getting you to watch more videos on its site, but in showing you those that are most pertinent. That’s why the company has begun testing out ways to leverage the technology behind its visual search capabilities to help you discover new videos. In the coming months, Pinterest also plans […]
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Pinterest is interested in not only getting you to watch more videos on its site, but in showing you those that are most pertinent. That’s why the company has begun testing out ways to leverage the technology behind its visual search capabilities to help you discover new videos.

In the coming months, Pinterest also plans to release a native video player, so watching and saving videos will be a seamless process.

As Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn get in on the video space, Pinterest naturally wants to follow suit. But the visual idea and bookmarking platform is not about creating content — rather, it’s interested in surfacing content that’s already been saved, going back to 2013. People are already able to use the Pin It button — which recently converted to Save It — on YouTube, Vimeo, and even on TED’s website to highlight videos from creators and influencers that they think others may enjoy. Pinterest shared that it has seen a 60 percent increase in the number of videos saved to the site over the past year.

“With more video on Pinterest, it needs to be easy for people to find the videos that match their interest,” the company said in a blog post. To accomplish this, Pinterest is turning to the technology that currently powers its visual search offering. This search capability, which was released in 2015, uses deep learning to examine tons of data, such as images and videos, and then makes inferences in response.

In June, this technology was incorporated into Pinterest’s camera functionality, which means that if you take a picture using Pinterest’s app, it’ll scan the image and show you associated pins. Based on today’s news, it appears that the company is now hoping to apply this deep learning technology to video.

Pinterest will be able to use the technology to identify objects in a video, such as ingredients used to make a specific food dish, and to determine the type of video. From there, the system will display recommendations of other footage you might be interested in. And, of course, it’s a learning algorithm, so over time it’ll keep learning and getting better.

As for the native video player, the goal is to show brands, bloggers, and subject experts that Pinterest has tools to showcase videos. The company expects to eventually allow users to upload video right to the site, rather than having them post a video to YouTube and then pin it to Pinterest. It also means more traffic will come to the site, and the company will also be able to better monetize its video offerings.

Although the tool is still being tested right now, Pinterest said its improved video discovery will start to roll out across all platforms “in the next few months.”

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/04/pinterest-testing-ways-to-improve-video-discovery/feed/02021785Pinterest testing ways to improve video discoveryPinterest’s commerce head explains how A.I. and machine learning will transform shoppinghttp://venturebeat.com/2016/07/19/pinterests-head-of-commerce-explains-how-a-i-and-machine-learning-will-transform-shopping/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/19/pinterests-head-of-commerce-explains-how-a-i-and-machine-learning-will-transform-shopping/#respondWed, 20 Jul 2016 04:25:26 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2006814Aunkur Arya, Braintree’s mobile general manager, and Michael Yamartino, Pinterest’s head of commerce, took the stage at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2016 event to talk about machine learning, artificial intelligence, and how the two concepts are transforming commerce. You can watch the full discussion above.
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Aunkur Arya, Braintree’s mobile general manager, and Michael Yamartino, Pinterest’s head of commerce, took the stage at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2016 event to talk about machine learning, artificial intelligence, and how the two concepts are transforming commerce.

You can watch the full discussion above.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/19/pinterests-head-of-commerce-explains-how-a-i-and-machine-learning-will-transform-shopping/feed/02006814Pinterest’s commerce head explains how A.I. and machine learning will transform shoppingPinterest acquires the team behind mobile apps Highlight and Shortshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/07/14/pinterest-acquires-the-team-behind-mobile-apps-highlight-and-shorts/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/14/pinterest-acquires-the-team-behind-mobile-apps-highlight-and-shorts/#respondThu, 14 Jul 2016 17:19:58 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2004106Pinterest announced that it has acquired the team at Math Camp, the company that produced the location-based app Highlight and also photo-sharing app Shorts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but both cofounders Paul Davison and Ben Garrett, along with a “majority” of Math Camp, will be joining Pinterest to work on mobile discovery […]
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Pinterest announced that it has acquired the team at Math Camp, the company that produced the location-based app Highlight and also photo-sharing app Shorts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but both cofounders Paul Davison and Ben Garrett, along with a “majority” of Math Camp, will be joining Pinterest to work on mobile discovery products within the company’s engineering, product, and design teams.

Math Camp’s technology was not part of the deal and as such will be sunsetted in the coming weeks, according to a Pinterest spokesperson. However, there are plans for Math Camp to open source many of its libraries and frameworks for developers to work on.

If you’re not familiar with Math Camp, then you might recognize Highlight. It burst onto the scene at South by Southwest years ago when location-based services were rather popular, thanks to the competition between Foursquare and Gowalla. Highlight is an app that sent you push notifications when you were near another user, with the intention of creating serendipity. Years later, the company launched Shorts, which lets you meet people based on photos they’ve taken.

“Pinterest is focused on helping people discover ideas on mobile, the web and in the real world,” said Steve Davis, lead product manager at Pinterest. “The team behind Math Camp are experts in building innovative mobile products to connect people with similar tastes and help them discover day-to-day images and video across platforms.”

Where Math Camp’s team could come in handy is in the mobile discovery space, perhaps leveraging what was done within Highlight and nearby stores or fellow Pinterest users in order to build more of a community. It’s also the possibility to bring swiping behavior into the visual ideas site that could make it even more compelling to use. After all, the more time you spend on Pinterest, the greater the opportunity to make money off of you, which attracts more advertisers and brands to use Buyable Pins.

It could also pair well with Pinterest’s recent announcement that it’ll allow you to do visual searches with the camera on your mobile device and place items into a virtual shopping bag.

In a statement, Davison said, “We’re excited to extend our learnings around recommendations as well as visual and real-world discovery to the millions of people who use Pinterest to find new ideas and do things they love.”

This is the third recent acqu-hire Pinterest has made in the past few months after picking up mobile commerce app Tote and smart keyboard app Fleksy.

Updated at 2:18 p.m. Pacific on Thursday: Here’s the email Math Camp’s team has sent to its users announcing the acqui-hire:

We’re delighted to announce that we are being acquired by Pinterest – to continue the work we’ve been doing around recommendations, image/video sharing, and real-world discovery, but at a much larger scale.

Though the team will live on, we’ll be focused on building within the core Pinterest product. Sadly, this means we’ll be shutting down the Highlight, Roll and Shorts apps over the coming weeks. In the meantime, we are going to be working hard to make sure it’s a smooth transition for you. We will also be open sourcing a lot of our work so that the developer community can benefit from it.

We can’t tell you how much we appreciate the support you’ve given us these past 5 years. Creating these products for you has been one of the best experiences of our lives. We feel so grateful for every moment of it, and hope to build many amazing things for you down the road.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/14/pinterest-acquires-the-team-behind-mobile-apps-highlight-and-shorts/feed/02004106Pinterest acquires the team behind mobile apps Highlight and ShortsBing image search on the mobile web takes a page from Pinteresthttp://venturebeat.com/2016/07/08/bing-related-images-mobile/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/08/bing-related-images-mobile/#respondSat, 09 Jul 2016 01:06:14 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1999528When you’re on a mobile device, the image search feature in Microsoft’s Bing search engine on the web now lets you highlight a specific portion of an image and find images that are similar to that particular part. To access the feature, you simply tap the magnifying glass in the top left corner of the […]
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When you’re on a mobile device, the image search feature in Microsoft’s Bing search engine on the web now lets you highlight a specific portion of an image and find images that are similar to that particular part. To access the feature, you simply tap the magnifying glass in the top left corner of the image. This functionality came first to Bing’s native iOS app earlier this year and arrived on Bing’s mobile site in May, a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Bing is trying to catch up to Pinterest in the domain of visual search, though, because Bing actually launched visual search using the camera on mobile devices before Pinterest introduced that feature.

The general point is that technology companies are continuing to develop more efficient ways for people to find exactly what they’re looking for.

There are no armies of part-time employees sitting around and picking out recommendations for images that might be relevant to end users — it’s all happening automatically, using a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data, such as images, and having them make inferences about new data. Microsoft was exploring deep learning in the context of Bing image search as far back as 2013. Two months after Microsoft published a blog post documenting that work, Pinterest announced its acquisition of VisualGraph, whose team later built the visually similar search into Pinterest.

Google, which has done extensive research in image recognition and deep learning, has not yet deployed visually similar search on mobile devices, although it has taken steps in that direction — last month it introduced object recognition in the Google Now on Tap feature of Android, and earlier this week that feature became capable of reading QR codes and barcodes. (Bing’s native Android and iOS apps can read those, too.) Reverse image search has long been available from Google — and Bing — but it doesn’t let you select a specific part of a given image and ask Google to find images that are similar to that part.

And image search from both Google and Bing have previously taken inspiration from Pinterest’s carousel of keyword suggestions to refine searches.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pinterest had no comment.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/08/bing-related-images-mobile/feed/01999528Bing image search on the mobile web takes a page from PinterestMobileBeat 2016 shows bots are hitting critical mass (full agenda)http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/07/mobilebeat-2016-shows-bots-are-hitting-critical-mass-full-agenda/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/07/mobilebeat-2016-shows-bots-are-hitting-critical-mass-full-agenda/#respondThu, 07 Jul 2016 13:45:23 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1997050VB EVENT: When Facebook launched its chatbot platform three months ago, the immediate hype was soon burst by a series of articles about how useless the first wave of bots were. But slowly and surely, a massive wave of tens of thousands of developers and bigger companies have hatched bots that actually do real, meaningful things — […]
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But slowly and surely, a massive wave of tens of thousands of developers and bigger companies have hatched bots that actually do real, meaningful things — from getting health tips from doctors, to getting personalized help with travel plans. We’ve been covering the news so far on our bots channel. At next week’s MobileBeat 2016 event on July 12-13, we’ll showcase a critical mass of bot activity. Once and for, it’ll prove that bots are coming in a big way. There’s no turning back now. Bottom line: Companies have to figure out what their bot strategy is.

And this includes not only text-based bots on Facebook, but voice-based bots on platforms like Amazon and Siri.

Let’s start with Facebook’s initial launch partners in April. There were many — including players like Shopify, Expedia, and Fandango. But most of them didn’t actually have live bots ready to go when Facebook launched the platform. Over the past three months, though, they’ve been working away on their bots, and we’ll be showcasing several of them at MobileBeat 2016, some for the first time.

At MobileBeat, we’ll also see one of the world’s largest pizza chains and one of the nation’s top grocery chains launch their bot strategies. We’ll hear from Wingstop, the chicken-wing restaurant chain, the first quick-service restaurant company to launch a bot on Facebook (Burger King originally said it was going to launch a bot, but hasn’t done so yet. And while Taco Bell launched a bot, it was solely on Slack). A leading national ticket-selling company will also launch its bot strategy at MobileBeat.

The list of new announcements at the event is too long to cover completely here, and we’re keeping many of them stealth until the event to respect companies’ launch plans. We’ll see new bots helping consumers and professionals do things in all sorts of areas: financial services, CRM, health, accounting, and travel industries. We’ll also see a host of new bot service provider companies: One offers end-to-end analytics for bots, another provides a Mailchimp-like service but for bots (cooler than it sounds, because it’s discovered a hyperpersonalized feature on Facebook), and several others offer robust and visually pleasing enterprise bots, including one that integrates nicely with Slack.

Finally, through deep-dive sessions, we’ll learn how brands and businesses are dealing with all the other important needs around bots, like customer service, when and when not to use natural language, the importance of personality, how to monetize (we’ll have one of the first big bot ad-monetization networks, Samba, on hand), how to do attribution, multivariate testing, design best practices, and how and when to integrate A.I.

The hottest area, by far, is travel – and that’s going to be reflected at MobileBeat 2016. Almost every major travel company will be represented at the event, including Priceline/Booking.com, Expedia, Hipmunk, AirBnB, TripAdvisor Trivago, and at least two new bot companies that are launching services at MobileBeat for the first time. For too long, travel companies have had to rely on Google for their leads. Google’s search engine is where most people type in their travel plans, and travel companies have found few alternatives — until now. With billions of consumers now spending more time in chat apps like Messenger, Whatsapp, Kik, and Line, travel companies are eager to engage them directly on those platforms through bots.

If all that isn’t enough to make you want to come to MobileBeat, I don’t know what will. We’re tapping into all this developer activity by also hosting the first international botathon. Below is an updated agenda of the event. This is a pivotal time in technology, and I’m personally as excited as I’ve been about the state of innovation in mobile. Hope you are too. See you there!

MobileBeat Day 1 (July 12)

8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

Registration

9:30-9:45 AM

Opening Remarks: Back to the Future
The return of the bot craze, and why it’s going to be bigger than ever. Matt Marshall introduces event and introduces Robert Hoffner (otherwise known as the “Botfather”) for a few remarks about how he built the bot phenom ActiveBuddy 16 years ago — and why it died.

Matt Marshall (VentureBeat) & Robert ‘The Botfather’ Hoffer

9:45-10:05 AM

Opening Keynote: A Bot to Run a Country
Machine Zone, which built one of the world’s most successful mobile games, is taking its many-to-many real time technology, and building technology that runs the entire New Zealand transportation system. And it aims to do more. Included on top is a bot that allows users and public officials to make decisions more efficientl

Gabe Leydon, CEO (Machine Zone)

Moderator: Matt Marshall, Founder (VentureBeat)

10:05-10:25 AM

The commerce vision
A pathbreaker in forging the vision for commerce in massive chat apps has been Kik, the company that has generated scores of millions of users among Millennials. We talk with Kik’s leading business executives about where trends are going in 2016 and 2017.

The state of Conversational Commerce, from the person who coined the term
Chris Messina, the technology evangelist who now works for Uber, but who created the hashtag, and who who coined the term “Conversational Commerce” in a column earlier this year, provides a mid-year update on bots, their potential, how they’ve emerged, what has worked, and what hasn’t.

Chris Messina, Developer Experience Lead (Uber )

10:35-11:05 AM

Networking Break
(Here’s your first chance to get to mix and mingle with your peers.)

11:05-11:35 AM

Breakout Session: Analytics First, Action Second
A deep dive into best practices for how to track engagement and other success variables within conversational UI, and how to feed information back into making a better product overall.

Breakout Session: Breaking down NLP
Everyone assumes NLP is perfect, now that Siri and Google Voice have made it seem everything is understandable. But NLP is actually struggling to keep up with expectations. Here’s how to apply NLP in your organization today. Learn from the experts.

Lunch & Expo
(Head to the Expo to grab a drink, some tasty eats, and check-out the latest tech and tools to help your business grow.)

12:50-1:25 PM

Lightning Rounds: Shiny New Bots
Six new companies launch to showcase how they’re disrupting industries with their new, flexible, personable bots.

Speaker names will be revealed day of the event!

1:25- 2:00 PM

Lightning Rounds: Brands with Bot Traction
Six brands step up to talk about their new bot strategies, or lessons learned with existing strategies.

Speaker names will be revealed day of the event!

2:00 PM

Networking Break

2:30-3:00 PM

Breakout Session: Conversational UI Design: Functional vs. Witty
The design of conversational UI needs to be simple and personalized. But beyond that, best practices are still up in the air. When do you go with a functional, straightforward text bot, when do you go with buttons, and when do you lead with personality? And when do you hand off to humans? Experts debate the future of smart bot design.

Breakout Session: Marketing in an Era of Predictive Technology, AI and Bots
A host of new technologies are converging to take marketing to the next level, right at the time when conversational UI and other new channels are pulling billions of users into modes where they expect a new kind of personalized, and more native marketing.

The New Suggestion-Based Economy
Google’s Director of Apps and Games Business Development, Purnima Kochikar will talk about the move away from the search-based economy to a suggestion-based economy, where conversational UI, instant apps, and mobile web are at the core of what’s to come. In this 1:1 with Matt Marshall, Purnima will share how the A.I. and machine learning that is going into products like conversational UIs, Home and competitive products is the result of 17 years of search history from the whole world. Purnima and Matt will also discuss how the customer’s journey was stolen away from the traditional app, but where they are going next and what opportunities lies within the customer’s next move in this new world of bots.

Purnima Kochikar, Director, Apps and Games Business Development (Google Play)

Moderator: Matt Marshall, Founder (VentureBeat)

4:30-4:50 PM

Closing Keynote: Ambitious Bots for Business
If Facebook has won the most attention as a platform for consumer-oriented bots, there’s no question that Slack has so far become the leader for business-oriented bots. We talk with the lead Slack platform product executive about what’s working on Slack, and what’s coming next.

Jason Shellen, Head of Product (Slack)

Moderator: Blaise Zerega, Editor-in-Chief (VentureBeat)

5:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Village Mob Party
We’re finishing out the night with a big, blow-out party complete with lights, music, food, and maybe even a few surprises. Check out the “Village Mob Party” tab for more info!

MobileBeat Day 2 (July 13)

8:30 AM – 5:00 PM

Registration

9:35-9:55 AM

Opening Keynote: The Sexiest Opportunities in AI
Hear from Rohit Prasad, leader of ‘Alexa’ for Amazon, on what are exactly the most promising areas to apply artificial intelligence in business today.

Rohit Prasad, VP, Alexa Machine Learning and Speech (Amazon)

Moderator: Matt Marshall, Founder (VentureBeat)

9:55-10:15 AM

Perspective: It Should Be About Humans, Not Bots
… at least in the leisure industry, and at most certainly and unabashedly for a fast-growing company like AirBnB, which prides itself on nurturing authentic relationships between travelers and hosts.

Joe Zadeh, VP Product (Airbnb)

Moderator: Blaise Zerega, Editor-in-Chief (VentureBeat)

10:15-10:45 AM

Networking Break

10:45-11:15 AM

Breakout Session: Achieving the “Commerce” in Conversational Commerce
In 2015, Uber’s Chris Messina coined the term “conversational commerce” to describe the coming trend of business-to-consumer interaction withi chat apps. However, commerce has so far been conspicuously absent for the most part, as consumers and brands figure out the rules of engagement. Here’s why commerce is going to be big.

Breakout Session: The Rise of the Bot Killer App: Customer Support
AI and conversational UI is perfect for customer support, and it’s one area that is already thriving, even as things like monetization or advertising lag behind. Come here from the experts who are engaging customers, retaining them, and amazing them with excellent customer service.

Breakout Session: What’s the Role of an App in a Bot Driven World
Marketers and brands will start using apps differently, now that conversational UI has emerged with powerful immediacy and personalization. But apps still offer many advantages, and for marketers, and it’s critical to be clear what they are. How will marketers change their strategies, and how will they decide what resources to devote to apps versus bots?

Lunch & Expo
(Head to the 3rd floor to grab a drink, some tasty eats, and check-out the latest tech and tools to help your business grow.)

12:55 -1:15 PM

How AI and APIs Can Transform Your Customer Experience, and Extending Your Platform Too
We talk with an executive of a major brand, about how APIs and AI can take your app anwhere, or bring other apps into yours — and why this is changing the way apps are thought about. In fact, the app is disappearing, and a user-controlled experience of assisted intelligence is appearing.

Brendan O’Driscoll, Bot Lead (Spotify)

Moderator: Matt Marshall, Founder (VentureBeat)

12:55 -1:15 PM

Future of apps versus bots as a distribution channel
We discuss the future of the app, with the leader of the fast-growing almost-Unicorn: food delivery company, Doordash.

Tony Xu, Founder & CEO (DoorDash)

Moderator: Sarah Guo, Investor (Greylock)

1:15-1:25 PM

Break

1:25-1:45 PM

International Perspective
Conversational UI and commerce has exploded in China, and has expanded throughout the world. We take a look at one of India’s new commerce giants, and discuss how conversational UI is driving that business’ growth.

Peeyush Ranjan, CTO (Flipkart)

Moderator: Blaise Zerega, Editor-in-Chief (VentureBeat)

1:45-2:25 PM

Lightning Round: The Bot Makers
Hear new announcements and presentations of some of the leading companies that make bots for others.

Speakers will be announced the day of the event!

2:25-2:55PM

Networking Break

2:55-3:25 PM

The Future of Commerce
The best way to delight consumers is to make commerce super intelligent — to know where they are, what service they’re using, and to offer them discounts or other deals that appeal to them according to the mode they’re in, whether they are in a car ride, booking a hotel, or ordering food.

Enterprise Bots: A Different Breed?
A host of legacy providers have created bot-like functionality for big businesses for some time. But super lightweight bots being created for the Slack ecosystem, and for bot platforms like Facebook that haven’t been considered enterprise players until now, are threatening to disrupt enterprise companies as we know them.

Lightning Rounds: New Shiny Bots (Part II)
Six new companies launch to showcase how they’re disrupting industries with their new, flexible, personable bots.

Speakers will be revealed the day of the event!

4:35-4:55 PM

Closing Keynote: Entertainment and Personality Bots
Several bot making companies, and even Google, are working hard on bot software that allow people to create bots that emulate their personality, or otherwise serve as personal assistants to them, to help interact with the outside world, and make their lives more efficient. Here we discuss the early experiments of personality bots, including one for tech evangelist, Chris Messina of Uber, and one for American rapper, and music producer, Redfoo of LMAFO by bot creator, Esther Crawford.

Happy Hour & Expo
(Chat, unwind and have some drinks and snacks on us. Network with your peers and cheers to another great MobileBeat!)

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/07/mobilebeat-2016-shows-bots-are-hitting-critical-mass-full-agenda/feed/01997050MobileBeat 2016 shows bots are hitting critical mass (full agenda)Pinterest is rolling out a shopping bag, buyable pins on web, visual search with your camerahttp://venturebeat.com/2016/06/28/pinterest-is-rolling-out-a-shopping-bag-buyable-pins-on-web-visual-search-with-your-camera/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/28/pinterest-is-rolling-out-a-shopping-bag-buyable-pins-on-web-visual-search-with-your-camera/#respondTue, 28 Jun 2016 17:24:51 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1990696Pinterest, the startup whose app lets people pin photos and other content to boards and even buy things shown in pins, today announced that the buy buttons that first appeared on the app are now coming to the web version. The startup is also adding a shopping bag that will follow you across devices. Pinterest […]
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Pinterest, the startup whose app lets people pin photos and other content to boards and even buy things shown in pins, today announced that the buy buttons that first appeared on the app are now coming to the web version. The startup is also adding a shopping bag that will follow you across devices.

Pinterest introduced buyable pins last year, and today Pinterest president Tim Kendall demonstrated the updates for reporters at a briefing at Pinterest’s San Francisco headquarters.

Above: Making a purchase from the new shopping bag on Pinterest on the web.

Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat

The bag is a modern implementation of a shopping cart — no longer will Pinterest exclusively be letting its partners handle purchasing. There’s even a new Pinterest Shop, with sections for Top Shops from vendors, Pinterest commerce product marketer Amy Vener wrote in a blog post.

For buyable pins, you can now see other products from specific vendors. So for a pin of a Kate Spade bag, you’ll see below the pin a few other bags from Kate Spade.

Above: Pinterest visual search with the camera on iOS.

Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat

Pinterest also introduced an enhancement to its visual search capability, which started rolling out last year. Starting on the Pinterest iOS app, users will be able to tap the camera button at the right of the search box and open up the camera on the mobile device and shoot a picture of something they’re interested in.

From there, the app will respond by showing dots over some of the objects that are recognized in the picture. Users can then tap on those dots to get those objects highlighted and see pins below that are similar to what’s highlighted. There are also tags for words that describe the objects detected in the image.

And the usual process of running a visual search within a pin has also changed a bit. You won’t need to hit the visual search button at the top right of the image and then manually highlight an area; just like with visual search using the camera, you can just tap the dots that are already placed on the image for you.

The technology is based on deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence that involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data (like photos) and then getting them to make inferences about new data. The specific implementation includes convolutional neural networks as well as residual networks, said Dmitry Kislyuk, a software engineer on Pinterest’s visual search team.

People make 130 million visual searches per month, Kislyuk said. An engineering blog post has more detail on the latest from Pinterest visual search.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/28/pinterest-is-rolling-out-a-shopping-bag-buyable-pins-on-web-visual-search-with-your-camera/feed/01990696Pinterest is rolling out a shopping bag, buyable pins on web, visual search with your cameraPinterest acqui-hires team behind mobile commerce app Tote, shutting it down July 15http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/22/pinterest-acqui-hires-team-behind-mobile-commerce-app-tote-shutting-it-down-july-15/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/22/pinterest-acqui-hires-team-behind-mobile-commerce-app-tote-shutting-it-down-july-15/#respondWed, 22 Jun 2016 17:12:30 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1985736Pinterest announced today that it has made another acqui-hire, picking up the team behind the mobile commerce app Tote. While the visual search engine hasn’t released any financial details of the deal, we’re told that Tote cofounders Mike Bidgoli and Langtian Lang will be joining Pinterest to work on growth and monetization. It doesn’t seem […]
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Pinterest announced today that it has made another acqui-hire, picking up the team behind the mobile commerce app Tote. While the visual search engine hasn’t released any financial details of the deal, we’re told that Tote cofounders Mike Bidgoli and Langtian Lang will be joining Pinterest to work on growth and monetization. It doesn’t seem that the third cofounder, Abuzar Amini, will be joining.

The technology behind Tote hasn’t been picked up, and as a result, the app will be shut down on July 15. The company has already released a service for Tote users to import their content directly to Pinterest.

Started by Bidgoli, Lang, and Amini in 2014, Tote sought to “shop the looks,” meaning that you could buy directly from bloggers and trendsetters without having to jump to the traditional ecommerce sites. In a Medium post, Bidgoli remarked that the inspiration for the app came from his wife, an avid online shopper:

In 2014, I noticed a shift in her online shopping behavior. Instead of visiting her favorite retailers’ websites and scrolling through endless items, she was browsing influencers on Pinterest, Instagram, and fashion blogs. The most fascinating part was that discovery was prioritized over shopping and shopping was a natural byproduct of discovery, not the other way around.

The experience the Tote team has will likely come in handy at Pinterest since they’ll work to improve the way we shop on the popular service. Pinterest already has Buyable Pins that facilitate purchases directly within its app, so Bidgoli and Lang’s involvement could expedite adoption. Bidgoli will be joining as a product manager, while Lang will assume the role of a software engineer at Pinterest.

For those looking at the Tote app in the App Store, the company’s name was listed as Sidewalk Labs. This might ring a bell because Google’s parent company Alphabet uses that name for an urban planning unit. However, the two are unrelated, and in 2015, the company behind Tote rebranded to Uptown Labs to match the name of their inaugural app.

Tote raised an undisclosed angel round of investment in February from Plug and Play, Tim O’Shaughnessy, and Adam Foroughi.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/22/pinterest-acqui-hires-team-behind-mobile-commerce-app-tote-shutting-it-down-july-15/feed/01985736Pinterest acqui-hires team behind mobile commerce app Tote, shutting it down July 15Pinterest acqui-hires team behind smart keyboard app Fleksyhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/06/15/pinterest-acqui-hires-team-behind-smart-keyboard-app-fleksy/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/15/pinterest-acqui-hires-team-behind-smart-keyboard-app-fleksy/#respondWed, 15 Jun 2016 17:10:43 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1980068Pinterest announced today that it has acquired the team behind the smart keyboard app Fleksy. The visual search engine company is not picking up the technology. The app itself will remain operational “for the foreseeable future,” but app updates will be “minimal.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Pinterest revealed that Fleksy […]
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Pinterest announced today that it has acquired the team behind the smart keyboard app Fleksy. The visual search engine company is not picking up the technology. The app itself will remain operational “for the foreseeable future,” but app updates will be “minimal.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Pinterest revealed that Fleksy founder and chief executive Kosta Eleftheriou will be joining the company’s product engineering team. Half of Fleksy’s 10-person team will be joining the mobile and mobile platform engineering departments.

In a blog post revealing the news, Fleksy revealed that “as a tribute to our incredible community of users,” it will be open-sourcing some of its components specialized for the blind and visually impaired.

“Pinterest is intensely focused on refining the mobile experiences that make it possible to flow effortlessly through our catalog of ideas — on any device, any place in the world,” said Scott Goodson, Pinterest’s head of core experience, in a statement. “The Fleksy team is made up of truly noteworthy engineers and world experts in their areas. These technical artists have a history of developing architecturally innovative, highly optimized software.”

Founded in 2011 by Eleftheriou and Ioannis Verdelis, Fleksy sought to change the way we communicated with our mobile devices, offering a touchscreen keyboard that was billed as faster, more accurate, and easier. It competed alongside the likes of Swiftkey, Swype, and others. And although it had raised $5.9 million in venture funding from investors like Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Middleland Capital, it seemed to be eclipsed by Microsoft’s acquisition of Swiftkey in February.

Although Fleksy’s app and technology isn’t being transferred over to Pinterest, the team will likely still find a way to incorporate it into the visual search and discovery site. Fleksy said that the team will “work on a variety of mobile-focused projects such as growth, core consumer features, and platform infrastructure.”

It’s estimated that Fleksy has received an estimated 5 million downloads on iOS and Android since July 2012, according to mobile market insights firm SensorTower.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/15/pinterest-acqui-hires-team-behind-smart-keyboard-app-fleksy/feed/01980068Pinterest acqui-hires team behind smart keyboard app FleksyMark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts hacked, LinkedIn password dump likely to blamehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/06/05/mark-zuckerbergs-twitter-and-pinterests-accounts-hacked-linkedin-password-dump-likely-to-blame/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/05/mark-zuckerbergs-twitter-and-pinterests-accounts-hacked-linkedin-password-dump-likely-to-blame/#respondSun, 05 Jun 2016 20:15:30 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1969924Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg understandably has accounts on other social networks – it only makes sense to keep tabs on what the competition is up to. But that doesn’t mean he bothers to maintain standard security practices on non-Facebook properties. This weekend, his Twitter and Pinterest accounts were hacked. The group responsible, OurMine […]
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Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg understandably has accounts on other social networks – it only makes sense to keep tabs on what the competition is up to. But that doesn’t mean he bothers to maintain standard security practices on non-Facebook properties. This weekend, his Twitter and Pinterest accounts were hacked. The group responsible, OurMine Team, also claimed to have gained access to his zuck Instagram account, though we were not able to independently verify this (Update: See below, his Instagram was not accessed).

We don’t know for sure how OurMine Team pulled off the hacks, but the group is claiming it was all thanks to the LinkedIn password dump from a few weeks ago. Millions of LinkedIn user account details leaked online last month — the company responded by invalidating the credentials and contacting affected members to reset their passwords. But the story doesn’t end there, because, as we all know, many people like to reuse the same password on different online services.

Twitter was quick to react. While writing this article, we noticed that Zuckerberg’s finkd account had been suspended. Upon publishing, we learned that Twitter had already brought it back, with the offending tweet deleted (Zuckerberg hasn’t tweeted anything since January 2012).

This is the best reminder yet that if you have a LinkedIn account, you should go ahead and change your password there, and everywhere else. In fact, you should make it a habit to regularly change your passwords on all your online accounts. And if that is too much of a pain, at the very least, make a habit of using different passwords.

In case you were wondering, Zuck’s Google+ account is intact. It’s not clear if that’s because he used a different account and password there or if nobody has bothered to check it yet.

We have contacted Facebook for more information and will update you if we learn more.

“No Facebook systems or accounts were accessed,” a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat in a statement. “The affected accounts have been re-secured.”

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/05/mark-zuckerbergs-twitter-and-pinterests-accounts-hacked-linkedin-password-dump-likely-to-blame/feed/01969924Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts hacked, LinkedIn password dump likely to blamePinterest replaces ‘Pin It’ button with ‘Save’http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/02/pinterest-replaces-pin-it-button-with-save/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/02/pinterest-replaces-pin-it-button-with-save/#respondThu, 02 Jun 2016 17:36:18 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1967702Pinterest, the web service that lets people pin photos, videos, and other content onto boards, today said that it has changed the text of the red button that’s visible on Pinterest and other websites. For years, it has said “Pin It.” But now it says “Save.” The announcement comes after Pinterest confirmed that it had started […]
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Pinterest, the web service that lets people pin photos, videos, and other content onto boards, today said that it has changed the text of the red button that’s visible on Pinterest and other websites. For years, it has said “Pin It.” But now it says “Save.”

The announcement comes after Pinterest confirmed that it had started to test just such a change on some users.

Now that more than half of people who use Pinterest are from outside the United States, we’ve been working harder than ever to make sure our app and website are easy to use no matter where you live or what language you speak. Unfortunately it turns out that the notion of “Pinning” ideas doesn’t always resonate with everyone around the world.

So we decided to test what would happen if we swapped our Pin It button for the more utilitarian Save instead. We were amazed by just how many new Pinners started saving ideas on Pinterest, especially people from outside the US.

In spite of the impressive numbers, we still really struggled with the decision to make the change. We have a lot of love for our Pin It button, which has served us well for so long. But the most important thing is for Pinterest to feel welcoming to everyone, and that’s why ultimately we went with the more understandable Save.

Pinterest has found through its testing that people save 10 percent more with its browser extension when it says “Save” rather than “Pin It.”

The word Save is becoming a more common feature of Facebook and even Google. Meanwhile, Pocket remains a place to save articles and other content from around the web.

But Pinterest has a solid base of more than 100 million monthly active users, and its content tends toward the visual, which distinguishes the app to a degree. So it’s no surprise to learn that YouTube is the most popular site for pins to come from so far this year. And the button itself has become widely adopted — there are now around 150 million “Pin it” — oops, make that “Save” — buttons on the internet, Walling wrote.

Also today, Pinterest said users can now see all of the boards onto which a pin has been saved.

Happy pinning! Or should I say happy saving?

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/02/pinterest-replaces-pin-it-button-with-save/feed/01967702Pinterest replaces ‘Pin It’ button with ‘Save’Pinterest lifts affiliate link ban after improving spam detection technologyhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/05/12/pinterest-lifts-affiliate-link-ban-after-improving-spam-detection-technology/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/12/pinterest-lifts-affiliate-link-ban-after-improving-spam-detection-technology/#respondThu, 12 May 2016 16:00:35 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1948988Pinterest is no longer banning affiliate links on its service, after decreeing more than a year ago that it did so to prevent spammers from abusing those links. The company today updated its policy to reflect this change, saying that it has improved its spam detection to better remove any bad content and that it […]
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Pinterest is no longer banning affiliate links on its service, after decreeing more than a year ago that it did so to prevent spammers from abusing those links. The company today updated its policy to reflect this change, saying that it has improved its spam detection to better remove any bad content and that it will be “rolling out all affiliate networks today and over the coming weeks.”

In February 2015, Pinterest warned “power pinners” that it was “automatically removing all affiliate links, redirects, and trackers on pins.” At the time, the company said that it “observed affiliate links and redirects causing irrelevant pins in feeds, broken links, and other spammy behavior. We believe [the ban] will enable us to keep the high bar of relevancy and quality pinners expect from Pinterest.”

If you posted such a link, Pinterest said that its systems would block it and thereby prevent the landing page from loading. Now you can resume posting affiliate links without any changes.

Adelin Cai, the company’s head of policy, told VentureBeat that Pinterest wants to enable good use cases of affiliate links. “We know there are good influencers out there,” she said emphasizing that the service was “not anti-affiliate.” The process to create these links hasn’t changed, she said, “as long as you don’t share spam or engage in spam behavior.” Cai explained that Pinterest has been spending the past year working on improving automation and human review of links to eliminate the spammy affiliate experience.

The company thinks this support will particularly benefit users outside of the U.S. Cai said that the re-enabling of affiliate links will help grow local markets, allowing users in the region to create content that’s relevant to the people there. “We want to get local influencers to stretch their content out on the platform,” Cai remarked.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/12/pinterest-lifts-affiliate-link-ban-after-improving-spam-detection-technology/feed/01948988Pinterest lifts affiliate link ban after improving spam detection technologyPinterest taps former Amazon exec as first independent and female board memberhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/05/11/pinterest-taps-former-amazon-exec-as-first-independent-and-female-board-member/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/11/pinterest-taps-former-amazon-exec-as-first-independent-and-female-board-member/#respondWed, 11 May 2016 17:00:33 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1948258Pinterest announced today that it has named Michelle Wilson to its board of directors, where she’ll offer guidance around how the company can continue to grow globally and better tap into the ecommerce space. The former Amazon executive becomes not only the first independent board member, but the only woman in the group. Other board […]
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Above: Pinterest has named former Amazon executive Michelle Wilson to its board of directors.

Image Credit: Pinterest

Pinterest announced today that it has named Michelle Wilson to its board of directors, where she’ll offer guidance around how the company can continue to grow globally and better tap into the ecommerce space. The former Amazon executive becomes not only the first independent board member, but the only woman in the group.

Other board members include Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann and early investors Jeff Jordan from Andreessen Horowitz and Jeremy Levine from Bessemer Venture Partners.

Wilson spent 13 years working for Amazon, where her last role was as senior vice president and general counsel for the online marketplace company. She not only worked closely with the board of directors but specialized in strategic and operating decisions around talent acquisitions, international expansion, public relations strategy, and more — all things that would fit well with Pinterest at this point.

Beyond Pinterest, she also sits on the board of Zendesk, Okta, and the Seattle PBS television affiliate KCTS 9.

While Wilson’s addition does diversify Pinterest’s board of directors, her expertise also seems to match the growth of the company. In April, it was revealed that most of the visual search engine’s growth was coming from outside the U.S., specifically in countries like Russia, South Korea, Mexico, France, Brazil, Japan, and Germany. Pinterest believes that its next 100 million users will be international.

Her experience at Amazon will probably be quite valuable to Pinterest, especially as it continues to build out its advertising business, including with Promoted Pins, which launched internationally in April, Buyable Pins, and other revenue-generating means.

The push to appeal more to international users isn’t far-fetched, and there are signs that the company is taking steps to make its service more inclusive, such as with its “Pin it” button. Earlier this week, Pinterest acknowledged that it was testing out a new label for its browser button where it reads “Save” for some users. “As we grow to be a more international service, ‘save’ translates better than ‘Pin it,'” said a company spokesperson.

“Pinterest is a treasured brand that helps people around world discover and do the things they love,” Wilson said in a statement. “I’m passionate about working with companies with a global vision for improving people’s everyday lives, and look forward to working with Ben and team on this journey.”

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/11/pinterest-taps-former-amazon-exec-as-first-independent-and-female-board-member/feed/01948258Pinterest taps former Amazon exec as first independent and female board memberPinterest’s browser button is now asking some users to ‘Save,’ not ‘Pin it’http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/09/pinterests-browser-button-is-now-asking-some-users-to-save-not-pin-it/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/09/pinterests-browser-button-is-now-asking-some-users-to-save-not-pin-it/#respondTue, 10 May 2016 00:48:12 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1946725Pinterest, that web and mobile app for saving and sharing Pins of images, videos, articles, and other content, has made a small but telling change to one part of its button. This update is showing up for some users on desktop browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. The button has historically appeared with the words […]
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Pinterest, that web and mobile app for saving and sharing Pins of images, videos, articles, and other content, has made a small but telling change to one part of its button. This update is showing up for some users on desktop browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. The button has historically appeared with the words “Pin it” in the top left corner of images that people can save to their boards, but in recent weeks that term has been replaced by the more generic “Save” for some users.

Several Twitter users who also use Pinterest have picked up on the change and tweeted about it.

Pinterest changed their button from "pin it" to "save." I feel like that defeats the purpose of their website.

“We’ve recently been testing ‘save’ in place of ‘pin’ in response to user feedback and to make it more immediately clear to everyone what ‘pin’ means,” the spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. “Additionally, as we grow to be a more international service, ‘save’ translates better than ‘Pin it.'”

Why is this tweak of nomenclature interesting? Because Pinterest, founded in 2010, was one of the first companies to offer a cross-platform tool for saving content to a private place on the Internet. Pocket, currently boasting 22 million users, has also done this for several years, but it has recently seen Facebook and Google double down on their own versions. Facebook’s Save feature, though barely promoted, now has more than 250 million monthly active users. So now Pinterest is retreating from its pin-centric lingo and embracing the more generic “save.”

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/09/pinterests-browser-button-is-now-asking-some-users-to-save-not-pin-it/feed/01946725Pinterest’s browser button is now asking some users to ‘Save,’ not ‘Pin it’Pinterest buys deep-linking startup URXhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/05/03/pinterest-buys-deep-linking-startup-urx/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/03/pinterest-buys-deep-linking-startup-urx/#respondTue, 03 May 2016 17:00:54 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1940895Pinterest has acquired mobile advertising startup URX, adding some of the team to its product management, engineering, and partnerships team. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Pinterest said the deal is for talent and it will “not be taking on any of the assets or technology.” Started by Andrew Look, Nathanael Smith, […]
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Pinterest has acquired mobile advertising startup URX, adding some of the team to its product management, engineering, and partnerships team. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Pinterest said the deal is for talent and it will “not be taking on any of the assets or technology.”

Started by Andrew Look, Nathanael Smith, James Turner, and John Milinovich in 2013, URX specialized in mobile commerce, billing itself as being able to showcase relevant mobile product ads that result in some form of action. Some of its clients include The Huffington Post, SPIN, Spotify, and Fetch. As a result of the deal, URX will be shuttering its advertising product, although the company hasn’t shared specific timing.

Reports first surfaced at Re/code last month about an acquisition deal between Pinterest and URX. It indicated that things weren’t so good at URX and there had been layoffs in recent months. Pinterest declined to comment, saying that it doesn’t disclose terms of business deals.

Milinovich, who will become a product manager at Pinterest, said in a statement, “URX was founded to create seamless, interconnected mobile experiences by helping people discover content inside apps. Discovery is one of the largest problems on the web, and Pinterest is well positioned to solve it at an unprecedented scale.”

Pinterest believes that the addition of URX’s personnel and their expertise in mobile content and search will help its development as it focuses on content intelligence and discovery. Mobile advertising is clearly a large opportunity — just look at Facebook’s earnings. If Pinterest wishes to continue playing in this space, it has to rapidly innovate, and URX’s capabilities may come in handy.

Jack Chou, Pinterest’s head of product, remarked, “We’re focused on building useful and relevant experiences to help people discover ideas and bring those ideas to life. We can now accelerate our efforts with the URX team, who are leaders in mobile content understanding, recommendations, monetization and discovery.”

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/03/pinterest-buys-deep-linking-startup-urx/feed/01940895Pinterest buys deep-linking startup URXPinterest rolls out its version of trending topics, called Featured Collectionshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/04/28/pinterest-rolls-out-its-version-of-trending-topics-called-featured-collections/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/28/pinterest-rolls-out-its-version-of-trending-topics-called-featured-collections/#respondThu, 28 Apr 2016 07:00:23 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1936866Pinterest has begun rolling out a way to highlight local and trending ideas from across its site. Every day, the company’s editors, along with local brands, celebrities, and influencers, will curate popular pins, users, boards, and searches within Featured Collections. This dedicated space is available to users in the U.K., France, Germany, Brazil, and Japan […]
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Pinterest has begun rolling out a way to highlight local and trending ideas from across its site. Every day, the company’s editors, along with local brands, celebrities, and influencers, will curate popular pins, users, boards, and searches within Featured Collections. This dedicated space is available to users in the U.K., France, Germany, Brazil, and Japan to start with and can be accessed on Android and on the Web.

Featured Collections is another way for users to discover great ideas in their native language, and it is designed to not only improve engagement, but to give new users more information on how to use Pinterest. The company claims that in early tests, this offering resulted in users finding and following more relevant boards. A spokesperson shared that Featured Collections makes it easy to browse pins and “serves as another channel to discover content,” in addition to search, recommendation, and more.

Local Pinterest community teams will rely on trending data to select what will be featured in these spaces. They’ll look at ideas posted by brands, celebrities, and Pinners who have “quality content” that represents popular topics within local areas.

Appealing to localized audiences is important because Pinterest is seeing substantial growth in its international markets. The company revealed that most of its users are based outside of the U.S. In fact, it believes that the next 100 million Pinners will be international. Although Pinterest declined to provide more specific information, it said that in the last year, user growth in Germany “nearly tripled,” while engagement in France, Brazil, and Japan “doubled.”

“We’re also seeing significant growth in markets like Russia, South Korea, and Mexico,” the company stated. Of course, these happen to the markets where Pinterest has spent resources on growth recently, including establishing local offices and community teams.

The growth numbers come just weeks after the company overhauled its iOS app to focus on a more personalized, clean, and fast experience. The announcement indicates Pinterest’s recognition that one service isn’t going to suit all markets and that localization is going to be increasingly important as it moves forward.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/28/pinterest-rolls-out-its-version-of-trending-topics-called-featured-collections/feed/01936866Pinterest rolls out its version of trending topics, called Featured CollectionsPinterest acqui-hires founder of design app Curatorhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/04/21/pinterest-acqui-hires-founder-of-design-app-curator/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/21/pinterest-acqui-hires-founder-of-design-app-curator/#respondThu, 21 Apr 2016 17:00:10 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1930934Pinterest has hired Daniel Nordh, founder of the design app Curator, as a lead product designer. The move was billed as a talent acquisition, making it Pinterest’s 10th aqui-hire. It also marks the company’s second international deal, since Curator is based in London. Pinterest declined to comment on the terms. We’re told that Curator’s iOS app […]
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Pinterest has hired Daniel Nordh, founder of the design app Curator, as a lead product designer. The move was billed as a talent acquisition, making it Pinterest’s 10th aqui-hire. It also marks the company’s second international deal, since Curator is based in London. Pinterest declined to comment on the terms.

We’re told that Curator’s iOS app will continue to exist but will no longer receive “significant updates.” And although the startup had two people on staff, only Nordh is joining the visual discovery engine service.

Started by Nordh, Curator is billed as letting you “organize your thoughts visually, refine your visual storytelling, collect inspiration, create mood boards, and export them to PDF or share them directly in the app…” This sounds very similar to what you can do on Pinterest, so it’s possible that Nordh’s skills will be complementary in furthering the design of Pinterest’s apps in the future, even after the company’s “largest engineering and design app update” this week.

Evan Sharp, cofounder and the chief creative officer for Pinterest, said in a statement: “Building the world’s catalog of ideas for every interest requires deep empathy with people all around the world. Daniel is a talented designer with a rich background in architecture, graphic design, music and technology. His experience building an app that makes it easy for people to save and present visual content makes him a great addition to our highly diverse design team.”

Design is obviously very important to Pinterest — you can’t have a “visual discovery engine” with bad design, right? — and the company has made moves to bring on board leaders in the space, including Andreas Helin of BVD and Sara Strand of 25ah, as well as Tim Belonax of Facebook and Airbnb, Katie Barcelona of Pentagram, and Byron Parr of Flipboard.